


WAP's Got Ghosts

by choomchoom



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-29
Updated: 2019-10-29
Packaged: 2021-01-06 02:57:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21219434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/choomchoom/pseuds/choomchoom
Summary: There's a ghostlike presence on the WAP. The Scavengers deal.





	WAP's Got Ghosts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lush_Specimen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lush_Specimen/gifts).

> For Lush_Specimen, who was my recipient for the Infinite Briefcases Spoopy Fic/Art trade! 
> 
> Takes place after Revolution/before Lost Light.

So basically, the WAP is haunted. There is a presence. They’ve got ghosts. Take your pick.

It starts with the coolant pipes. One day they’re fine, then they sound like they’re about to shake apart, then they’re fine again. But there’s about ten thousand pieces of the WAP that do things like that. The fact that the ship hasn’t already exploded in deep space is evidence of Primus, really.

But Krok knows that’s when the ghosts start because the day after the thing with the pipes, the doors start slamming.

Either it happens to Crankcase most, or he just complains the loudest about it. Krok gets good at taking doors at a run so they don’t have time to slide halfway shut and hit him in the side, but for that day there’s never more than a few minutes between cries of rage as people try to walk through the doors.

“I think it’s ghosts,” Spinister says, completely serious, when Krok asks in desperation if he has any idea what might be going on.

Krok sighs and goes to ask someone else. He asks everyone else. No one else has a clue.

So. They’ve got ghosts.

Fulcrum reads a bunch of books about hauntings and then invites everyone to a séance in the main room, but they all get distracted and the event turns into them watching Skullcruncher with unpleasant incense burning on the table.

The shrieking starts next, as dramatically as possible with Grimlock running from the washracks to the other end of the shuttle, somehow managing to douse everyone in dirty solvent on his way. Misfire insists that something must be up for Grimlock to be acting this way, and takes his own shower to prove it. He runs screaming down the hallway after too, but Krok suspects that it’s an affectation to protect Grimlock’s ego, so he checks it out himself.

The voice screeching in his audials, just on the edge of words, when the solvent spray is on, is unpleasant enough that Krok forgives Grimlock (but not Misfire, who should have expected it) for bolting.

Fulcrum organizes a meeting, and Krok is fully content to let him handle the situation. Fulcrum hasn’t been with them long enough to realize that on the Scavengers scale of weirdness, ghosts barely registers.

The crew is all in the living room at the indicated time, but Krok suspects that might have been coincidence. Spinister and Misfire have let Fulcrum mute the TV, but they’re both looking at him like he’s turned into the entertainment for the evening.

“I need to know if any of you have brought anything that might have a strong necromantic energy aboard the ship lately,” Fulcrum starts.

“Oh, like this?” Spinister goes into his room and returns with a completely ghastly statue. Misfire shrieks a little at the sight of it. The statue is all black, and made of intertwisted organic bones and calcified organs, arranged in completely the wrong patterns.

“Are those _real_?” Krok asks, feeling a little sick.

As though he’s performing a diagnostic test, Spinister crushes a corner of one of the bones and rubs the resulting particulate between two fingers. He shrugs. “Dunno.”

Fulcrum puts his head in his hands and groans.

They space the horrifying statue, and Fulcrum walks around Spinister’s room burning incense and stumbling over unfamiliar syllables from one of the ghost books, but the ghosts don’t leave.

“Ugh. Cold spot.” Misfire shivers as he enters the living area, where Krok is playing fullstasis with Fulcrum.

“Hey, that’s a sign –” Fulcrum is interrupted by Crankcase, who yells “Out of the way!” and raises a gigantic gun that, even halfway across the room, Krok can see has been painstakingly labeled “Ghost Gun.”

“No guns on the – !” Krok’s words are drowned out by a shot from the gun. Misfire flings himself out of the way, right into the fullstasis board, and Krok braces himself for the gun to have blown a hole in the ship’s hull.

What the gun does is make a hole in the middle of the hallway. Not the floor, not the walls, the hallway itself. Where there’s supposed to be a view of the rust spot on Fulcrum’s door, there’s now just a ring of blackness, staying steady in position even as the WAP continues to fly through space.

“Where did you get that?” Fulcrum asks, at the same time as Misfire asks, “What did it do?”

“If you think about it, in a way, we’re all ghost guns,” Spinister says.

That’s all anyone has time for before the being steps out of the hole. Krok grabs a blaster from beside the sofa, curses when he realizes that it’s been modded for Shoot Shoot Bang Bang, and holds it up at the alien who has just come through the…portal? It looks like probably a portal.

Maybe extradimensional beings are allergic to paint. You never know.

“We’ve been trying to communicate with your plane of existence,” the being says. It’s wearing a uniform that strikes Krok, from days of peeking at ghost books over Fulcrum’s shoulder, as being distinctly necromantic. A black hood obscures any face it might have.

“Congratulations on your success!” Misfire says, not wary enough by half. Crankcase, clearly thinking along similar lines, steps on his toe.

“What do you want?” Krok asks, paint gun still raised.

“To give you this,” one of them says, reaching into a pocket.

“Slowly,” Krok says. The alien obeys, and painstakingly withdraws a crumpled piece of that weird pulp humans use for communication.

“You dropped this,” the being explains.

Misfire’s jaw drops. He slaps Spinister in the arm. “Hey! That was MP3’s. Wait, are you from – what was it called?”

“The Brand,” Crankcase says. Comfortingly, he appears to have his _actual _guns trained on the boarders.

“Indeed we are,” it says. “Would you like pamphlets? We have pamphlets.”

“No thanks,” Krok says.

“We’ll get that letter back to its owner,” Misfire says, plucking it from the being’s fingers.

“So you’re going to stop bothering us now?” Fulcrum asks.

“We have successfully reached your plane. There will be no more attempts to communicate,” it says. “If you’re sure about those pamphlets.”

“Is this a “we take one and you go away” sort of situation, or a “we take one and then you think we’re interested so you keep sending more” one?” Krok asks.

“Point taken,” the being says. “The Brand beckons. Enjoy your existence.” With a step backward into the hole in the hallway, both the being and the portal are gone.

Krok finally lets the paint gun drop to his side, clumsily enough that it fires a round at the floor.

“You were going to shoot that thing with paint?” Fulcrum asks, sounding like he expects Krok to explain why it was a perfectly good plan, actually.

Krok doesn’t want to deny him the illusion, so he turns to Crankcase. “Where did you get a ghost gun?”

“Remember Brainstorm?”

Krok holds up a hand to forestall any further explanation. “Asked and answered.”

Crankcase doesn’t stop. “He sent me the plans, I did the mods myself,” he says. “I think it was very smart of me. I think I should get a raise.”

Krok doesn’t have to respond to that, because a second after Crankcase finishes, they all hear a door slam.

“_Was that not the ghosts_?” Fulcrum practically sobs. Krok is sympathetic.

Then they hear heavy footsteps in the hallway and Krok, at least, realizes that that was a perfectly normal door slam.

Grimlock lumbers up to the group, still standing in an awkward circle in the living room and hallway, and goes, “What?”

“No more ghosts, buddy,” Misfire says, patting the side of Grimlock’s neck.

“They weren’t actually ghosts in the first place,” Krok argues.

“What if they were, though?” Misfire asks, making his thinking-very-hard face.

Krok lifts the paint gun back up and shoots him. Misfire shrieks, Grimlock roars, and everyone runs for their own guns.

A good game of Shoot Shoot Bang Bang Trademark Crankcase will be just what they need to clear the ship of the…metaphorical ghosts of ghosts, or something. Whatever. What matters is that everyone’s having fun.


End file.
